[progbackup] Backing everything up

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Active Member

My HDR-T2 has been on the fritz for a while now and several posts on the forum make me think that the hard drive is on the way out. Apart from the fact that we only bought the dratted thing in February, how do we go about rescuing the contents before it goes back for repair?

Well, the answer seems to be that we need:
1) Custom firmware
2) Auto-unprotect installed and running
3) An external hard drive with enough space that you can write to
4) A cunning script to save you lots of time

It's a half-baked script but it seems to be working fairly well at the moment. The key points are:
1) It'll help you to not shoot yourself in the foot when choosing a target backup drive, but it's still possible if you try hard enough (nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool)
2) It doesn't yet stop you from suggesting a read-only file system, but that's not really a problem
3) If you stop and restart, or if more programs are recorded during the first run, subsequent runs will only sweep up the files that haven't been saved - that's great when you're trying to run a backup and the other half is still trying to record.
4) You might end up with some partial files lying around if you break out of the program, something to worry about later, but (3) will sort you out as a failsafe.
5) Because the files are being decrypted, fancy features like thumbnails or programme info will not be stored - this is a script to rescue your recordings so that you can store them elsewhere or to put them back onto a replacement machine.
6) The script doesn't copy sidecar files (no point) or any other content (why bother, this script is aimed at decrypting stored content and that's only the recorded programmes, you have ftp for the rest)

As I type, my backup has 899 files left so I expect that it will be busy for the next day or so - any suggestions?

Member

The thread is entitled "Backing Everything Up" but you say: quote "6) The script doesn't copy sidecar files (no point) or any other content (why bother, this script is aimed at decrypting stored content and that's only the recorded programmes, you have ftp for the rest)"
If it is to be usefull and easy to use by us oldies, doesn't it need to be one operation to bu everything?
I don't know, but aren't the files in 6) needed when restoring recordings to a new machine?

Active Member

The thread is entitled "Backing Everything Up" but you say: quote "6) The script doesn't copy sidecar files (no point) or any other content (why bother, this script is aimed at decrypting stored content and that's only the recorded programmes, you have ftp for the rest)"
If it is to be usefull and easy to use by us oldies, doesn't it need to be one operation to bu everything?
I don't know, but aren't the files in 6) needed when restoring recordings to a new machine?

As it stands, the simple intention is to have SOME form of backup of the files that would otherwise be completely lost if you sent your box back for repair. af123's comment about using the hmt utility looks interesting, but right now, I just want to have a copy of the recorded files and anything else is just icing on the cake (don't forget my info-dump script which will also be useful if copying the files elsewhere).

The script is not meant to be a finished item, I have literally just chucked it out on the Internet as work-in-progress to see what other people would be interested in having if they were in the same situation. I'm making no promises but I'm hoping that wish-lists may lead to contributions from others and you never know what may happen as a result

Member

Wow, really cool. Liking this. I see you implemented what I asked for in another thread - namely wget copying the "mediaID".ts and renaming it to "file".mpg - on the localhost. If this is modified to copy the file over the original, then it should be possible to share HD content in it's original location. Something like an auto-decrypt script.

Active Member

Wow, really cool. Liking this. I see you implemented what I asked for in another thread - namely wget copying the "mediaID".ts and renaming it to "file".mpg - on the localhost. If this is modified to copy the file over the original, then it should be possible to share HD content in it's original location. Something like an auto-decrypt script.

Very interesting, not something that I'd considered (or even thought possible) when I started writing this. I'll look at that once I've sorted the backup side of things, but recovering SWMBO's programmes from a failing box has to take priority for the moment

Member

Well you've proved what is possible, so maybe a modified script based on this work can be linked to the webif interface on right click to auto-decrypt the current file - replacing the original and updated sidecar files - maybe moving the originals to a backup-type directory just in case they need to be restored. The user can then delete the directory when confident that the new files work satisfactorily.

Appreciate the need to get those thousand files backed-up first, though.

I'm so loving all the extras that this community is coming up with - really makes the box better than when bought!!! Thanks and kudos to all who've helped get it this far...

Active Member

The copying has gone well overnight - just under 400 files left to copy. Thankfully a lot of the content is radio programmes, so they don't take long.

Once I've got the backup, I'll copy over the sidecar files and patch them for the new location turning off the decryption flag along the way. If that works, it would be very easy to turn this into a script that would do decrypt-in-place.

Administrator

Here's a script I've had lying around for a while that does command line decryption. It's written in Jim but I've never gone back to it to finish testing.. It's probably ok to put into a package and let people use without too much more effort.
It leverages the Jim classes in the web interface so it doesn't have to think too hard about things like SQLite..

Hummy.tv SEO Guru

Would be even better if it just ran in the background (like auto unprotect) and just decrypted anything not already decrypted!! The first run would be a bugger but after that it would just be on new recordings. Might need to watch out for power offs while it's working though?...

Member

Active Member

Would be even better if it just ran in the background (like auto unprotect) and just decrypted anything not already decrypted!! The first run would be a bugger but after that it would just be on new recordings. Might need to watch out for power offs while it's working though?...